vrbo.com

David Clouse and his wife Lynn started VRBO.com (Vacation Rental by Owners) as a way to help rent their ski condo. As the site grew it took up more and more of there time until it became a full time job.

We spoke with David to find out how it changed their life.

Your name:                            David Clouse

Position / title:                       Founder / Webmaster

Company name:                   Vacation Rentals by Owner

Website:                               www.VRBO.com

Your company / website vision statement / goal:

To promote privately owned vacation rental properties as an alternative to "traditional" hotel accommodations.

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):

Property owners can "list" their properties on the VRBO website by completing an online application which asks a series of questions about the property... owner can post photos of the properties... we charge an annual fee... renters contact the property owners directly to rent the property, we do NOT collect a commission.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

As long as I can remember, I've had an entrepreneurial spirit... I sold real estate in the early 80's (when interest rates hit 16% - yikes) and ran a small business steam cleaning restaurant kitchen's before I decided that computers where what I really wanted to do.

I was a computer programmer/analyst for the hospitality and airline industries for about 15 years.

Have you got any qualifications?

Not really... I was in the right place at the right time... I had an idea and I did something about it. In combining 3 of my interests, vacation rentals, real estate and computer programming, VRBO.COM was formed.

Please tell us about yourself academically?

I have a BA in Business administration from Point Loma Nazarene University (San Diego) class of 1979 and computer programming certification from the Computer Learning Center (San Francisco) - Internet skills have been self taught.

How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?

We (My wife Lynn and I) owned a ski condo in Breckenridge, Colorado in the early 90's. At that time, the management companies wanted to charge 45% to manage and advertise the property for me... I felt I could do better on my own, but locating renters was difficult... we used to place a 15 word ad in the back of Ski Magazine (no photos of course) and that cost about $700 for 5 months of advertising...

I figured there must be a better way to reach the renters directly...

In 1995 I started exploring the possibility of using the Internet to advertise vacation rentals. Based on our experiences renting our ski condo, I created a database to store the pertinent information about our property and I programmed the database to create a web page advertising that property (we didn't show photos at that time, only text). I then started trying to understand how to get the web pages to show up high on the search engines (It was much easier back then).

Once our Breckenridge condo pages where showing up high in the search engines, then other property owners started contacting us to create pages for them.

Initially, we did not charge a fee to list a property on the site... We felt like we had to build up our inventory of properties first before clients would be willing to pay... but after a year, the work got to be more than I could handle on my own (I was still working a full time job).

We decided that it was time to see if the business model was real or not and had find out if people would really pay for the service we provided... this was a critical stage because up to this point I was doing all the work myself without compensation. Once checks starting appearing in our mailbox, we knew that it really was working.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice what would it be?

Sorry, gotta give two:

1. Look for something you ENJOY DOING and DO IT... if you enjoy doing it, even if it fails, you'll still get a reward for having done it.

2. Delayed gratification is a wonderful thing... Don't spend what you don't have... Live below your means... Don't let yourself get trapped by debt...

Who are your role models / mentors and why?

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